My Life After Dying: Becoming Alive to Universal Love

Ritchie, George G., Jr.

Account by a physician who had a near-death experience when he "died" of pneumonia in 1941 when he was 20 years old. Ian Stevenson writes in the Foreword that he has heard Ritchie tell his story on several occasions and read reports written at different times and is impressed by "the stability of his narration," which has not become exaggerated in the 30-year period he has known him. In Part I Ritchie reviews his "death experience," and interesting phenomenological account of being out of the body and not being able to get back in, a vision of Christ, and a life review, a tour of other realms, with Christ as guide: Earth, Purgatory?, Hell, Paradise?, and Heaven. Part II of this Autobiography describes how he learned to incorporate what he learned in those few moments of epiphany into his life as a physician. One aftereffect of his NDE was that he sees spiritual healing as a part of medicine. In the final part he gives his view of Christian spirituality and guidelines for living that resulted from his NDE. He suggests that he, and others like him, died, or came close to dying, because "a great and loving God was trying not only to save us but to bring us back in order to tell and show in our living, a better way of life for our world" (p. 136).